Streaming is killing music, so why are you still streaming? Yes, I’m looking at you!
Part one: the slide to streaming
Not that long ago, certainly in most of our lifetimes, music was a product that people purchased in things called record stores, or saw live, heard on the radio or on the TV (but that second part is a story for another day).
Technology of course changes things and changes lives constantly, and often for the good, but as the vinyl record with all its paraphernalia and ritual started to lose ground to more ‘convenient’ forms of listening such as the 8-track and then the cassette, that whole ‘ritual’ aspect of looking at the album’s artwork, reading the lyrics and even turning the record over to the turntable started to erode. All we were left with was the physical product, a cassette was way cheaper to produce for the labels, way easier to handle for the consumer, but way inferior in sound quality. So back in the 70’s when cassettes started to take over from vinyl, consumers had already been given a choice (remember choice – that’s an important word here) and chose convenience. After all who didn’t want music in their car that wasn’t at the mercy of the radio programmers?
Then came the CD which Frankie Banali recently told me was “the beginning of the end” – as soon as you had the CD you effectively had the recording in all its glory and all of its detail and like cassettes which allowed you to ‘tape’ legitimately purchased recordings from friends soon came the ability to ‘copy’ CDs (despite various industry attempts to foil this). Strangely though for me at least, the great thing about that was that you got to create ‘compilations’ of your favourite songs just like you had with cassettes a decade earlier.
Music sales dipped a little but the new format also led to a lot of consumers buying the CD version of the album or tape they already had and that I guess was a driver for the labels who saw the opportunity of selling the same product a second time, or a third, or a fourth.
There was still of course in those days only so much music you could get to hear and the labels and the radio and even TV still had a large say in directing people’s listening, though magazines also has their glory days in the 80’s and celebrated underground artists that mainstream labels and radio didn’t touch. It was a glorious time and a time of discovery for many teenagers like myself.
The only downside of the rise of CDs for the consumer of music was that it became harder and harder and more expensive (another boost for the labels) to find the vinyl release of the music you wanted and in some cases the vinyl ceased to be released. By the late eighties we were already seeing a huge fall in the number of releases being committed to vinyl and fewer and fewer new albums as time went by were even released on cassette tape.
Just because something is convenient doesn’t always mean it is a good thing…
OK so enough of the history lesson.
What really started the slide towards streaming was of course the internet, but it took years of inaction as the world waited for speeds to increase before you could even envisage what would become ‘digital downloads’
I remember back in 1993 a friend sending me a copy of a song he’d just recorded – the two minutes and 32 second track at ‘dial up’ internet speeds took me over half an hour to download and when it was ready after a couple of drop-outs the quality was simply awful. Sure the fact that it had made it from the US to Australia was a miracle but in truth he could have played it to me over the phone and I could have recorded it over the speaker and the end product would have been almost as crisp.
It was however, I thought, possibly the beginning of the end, though then, like now, I still find it hard to imagine anyone wanting to have such a distant and sterile connection with something I’m sure you’ll all agree makes life so much richer.
Remember just because something is convenient doesn’t always mean it is a good thing. Technology is addictive and people tend to follow the crowd but at the end of the day it has real impacts on lives. Technology has already all but killed off what used to be well paid jobs and most of those sadly are in the creative arts like photography, like journalism and the assault on musicians is relentless. Do we really want a world where computers generate art, film and music? That’s the way we’re heading as the labels scramble to salvage anything they can. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves…
People will always want something for nothing?
Sure file-sharing pissed off some high profile musicians and as a result file-sharing became the enemy, but because of that focus no one really looked ahead, they just reacted. No one even gave technological solutions much of a go, and none of the big sites were blocked or taken down. Instead it was lawsuits against fans who illegally downloaded what in many cases were ‘bootlegs’, something that had been around since the sixties. It wasn’t so much the attack on those illegal recordings though, it was the venom that some rather high profile artists attacked groups who were essentially fans that stuck in the craw. File sharing of non-official releases was you might even argue keeping the fans happy and putting the bootleggers out of business. For fans like me the magic of hearing a live recording, however tinny, of a band you’d never seen was something that made you even more of a fan and filled the gap between official releases that you also PURCHASED.
Think back – the method of operation for record labels had always been to get bands to pay for everything and take the lions share of the profit – a parasitic practice that was exacerbated further once the accountants got in control of the labels. Then any pretense that the music business wasn’t purely money-driven was gone, everyone was scrambling for the cash and no one was even considering how to better serve the music buying public. No one got creative, no one got innovative.
In the age of downloads now the fans that actually were buying the records were fair game along with those that were stealing them. That was a huge tactical mistake.
Are we ever going to get to talk about streaming?
Hey hold on, I’m getting there!
As internet speeds got faster tech moved to take advantage of them. All of a sudden there were legal download sites, like iTunes where if you read the fine print you downloaded something you couldn’t sell, transfer and really at the end of the day didn’t actually own. It was like selling air to people, and they bought into it like crazy (go on think about what you actually get from streaming now and we’ll catch up later). The wonderful thing was that some people even bought downloads of music they already owned physical copies of!
Globally of course this type of delivery is nothing new. The capitalists of the world want to license you everything through a delivery system that they control (It’s not only music) – giving you nothing for your ongoing fee, when your fees lapse you lose the lot, that is if you ever owned anything in the first place.
iTunes ruled the world for a good few years, beating out it’s competitors and when it had market share – ramping up its prices so that if your were in the US you were paying less than a dollar a download, whilst the rest of the world paid roughly a dollar a song. Can you imagine that now? A dollar a song? Paying the same price for a dozen digital files as you would for physical product that had to be manufactured then shipped. Those guys must have laughed hard and long until they almost choked!
I wonder sometimes if people still love music like I do?
Just thought I’d throw that one out there as the next article is going to be all about supporting the artists we love in the best ways we can. Anyway back to this month’s rant…
Streaming is the illusion of a universe of choice.
Now if you thought that the whole iTunes set-up short-changed the artists then streaming really starts to stink. Streaming gave a huge illusion of choice – at best it was a massive library where you could ‘try before you buy’ but in reality that potential future purchase just never happened. And let’s face it, some of the music we loved just wasn’t there at all (and still isn’t). Fundamentally it changed the way especially younger consumers related to music. And it’s that which is destroying or diminishing the livelihoods of many artists.
Why do you think brands like Microsoft want to license everything these days? Because it gives them a steady stream of revenue. AND they don’t actually have to give you anything you can ‘own,’ it’s perfect capitalism isn’t it? Virtual delivery of intangible items you’ll never hold or connect with at a level music fans used to.
If you die with a huge collection of vinyl, tapes and CD’s then your nearest and dearest can do as they will with them. If you die with an iTunes library, well it dies with you. If you die with a steaming service I’m not even sure anyone will know or notice or care. A bit like a blade of grass falling in a field when no one is there to see it.
The problem for the casual music consumer is that streaming makes perfect sense, some noise to listen to on the train, or in the car and heaps of variety for $9 or little more a month. Let’s face it some people don’t even care about new music do they? Some just don’t want a wall of ‘product’ gathering dust!
Some people don’t care where the stuff they wear comes from do they? Or how their food is produced, or where that item you were sold cheap down the pub originated? But if some people knew then they might consider their choices more, might even spend a little more to get something that was legit or ethically sourced? What if you knew that song you played by that cool new artist had to be played a million times before they could buy a coffee?
But really it’s all a bit like life. Music is pretty much the same right? If you’re rich you win and if you control the whole apparatus you can set it up so that you never lose. A streaming service just cuts their payments to labels if they want more money (remember artists might then only get a cut of what the label gets if anything at all). Lower down the chain, labels just pay their artists a fraction of what they receive.
Large bands and brands are OK of course, they get to negotiate their deals and get the lions share, but small new musicians? Slave labour? Well it’s looking close to that. Remember that streaming services only pay master royalties to labels they do not pay publishing. Publishing is deducted from the master share to give the comparable cost per song/album. So if a song was paid at 99c (which of course is just an example as the figure is far too high), the song would be 70c wholesale after the 30% fee. So if you deduct 1 full stat mechanical at 0.091c you arrive at 60.9c per song, an already diminishing fee. According to various 2017 figures that starting point per stream might be between 0.00022c and 0.00783c per song (some very small players do pay more but we’re looking at volume here).
So want to earn $10? Well then get to work and stream that song between 45,500 and 1,277 times! Then do that above calculation and THEN wonder how much of that (and how quickly it) gets to an artist!
Existing music labels argue that they own the ‘product’ and sure they do, but if your band is say twenty years old then ‘streaming’ didn’t exist then. Can you imagine any artist agreeing that their label could sell their music for a fraction of the already meager return they previously received? Is a fraction of a cent really worthwhile just to ‘get your music out there?’ it’s like asking a band to play free shows ‘for exposure’ whilst the promoter takes in the ticket money.
Radio pays to play songs to it’s listeners, even podcasters pay a licensing fee, both do so whilst trying hard to raise revenue to continue doing so. What do streaming companies pay? A small fraction of their income?
It’s those figures and that chain that we’ll get to in our next ‘rant’ and we’ll also look at ways artists can make more money from their blood, sweat and tears…